Eric Boehlert: What a mess -- Maureen Dowd lectures liberals about the press

[babylonsister]

What a mess — Maureen Dowd lectures liberals about the press
Eric Boehlert
3 hr ago


Anxious to engage in Both Sides whitewashing of journalism failures from the Trump era, some prominent journalists are lashing out at liberals for having the nerve to criticize news coverage of the Biden White House. Leading the defensive charge is New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who penned a condescending harangue over the weekend, claiming liberals are hypocrites for finding fault with the press when a Democrat is in the Oval Office.

Embracing a straw man argument that Democrats "lionized" the media during the Trump years because they detested him so much, Dowd insists the left is guilty of hypocrisy because they can't take it when the media's critical lens focuses on Democrats. "The truth is, many on the left don’t understand what a reporter is," Dowd lectured Times readers, most of whom know exactly what a reporter is.

Dowd's scolding was immediately picked up by other elite journalists on Twitter, who lent their voices to the idea that liberals don't understand how journalism works, and mocked Democrats for thinking the press should not hold their party accountable. (Spoiler: Zero Democrats actually think that.) By embracing that absurd claim, journalists feel free to dismiss criticism from the left, because they say it's not based in reality. That's a convenient dodge and it's also delusional.

First off, if Dowd thinks liberals spent four years lionizing the New York Times for its Trump coverage, then the Beltway bubble she lives in is even more impenetrable and remote than I thought. Progressives for years were rightly fuming over the Times' forced timidity when covering Trump — the paper's failure to call out his lies, its never-ending attempt to normalize his radical behavior, and the daily's relentless, fawning coverage of Trump voters, who were depicted as the true voice of authentic America — not the backbone for a looming insurrection.

Secondly, the idea that after four years of watching the Trump media circus, liberals think Beltway journalists are on their side, as Dowd claims, is beyond comical. Liberals understand perfectly well how this game is played and are under no illusions that the Times is doing the Democrats' bidding. In fact, quite the opposite.

This is the newspaper that waged war for eight years against the Bill Clinton presidency. The newspaper that mocked Democratic nominee Al Gore nearly every day of the 2000 campaign. The newspaper that co-sponsored the GOP's Iraq War, with some of the worst pre-war reporting in modern history. The newspaper that published all kinds of sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2008 and 2016.

more...

https://pressrun.media/p/what-a-mess-maureen-dowd-lectures

[Comfortably_Numb]

1. MoDo can FO

[gratuitous]

2. Stuff it, Maureen

Maybe you've forgotten, but a lot of us haven't, the credulous reporting of Judith Miller in antebellum Iraq, or the weekly wet valentines to Dubya penned by Elisabeth Bumiller that appeared every Monday on the Graying Lady's front page. We also remember how long it took for the popular media to use the word "lie" to described the daily output of the Trump White House. Mainstream outlets tied themselves into pretzels trying to avoid saying that a statement out of the Trump administration was a lie.

We see how the standards as applied to past Republican administrations faded away, only to come back stronger than ever when it came time to report on Democratic administrations. The sudden fascination with the national debt for just one, a concern that was totally absent from the media's reporting on the last disastrous round of Trump tax cuts. And the only remedy the Times and its media cohorts can think of is to cut programs and benefits because raising taxes on the wealthy is strictly out of bounds for some reason.

[crickets]

3. Eric Boehlert nails it: the lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Well worth reading the whole thing.